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Property from the Collection of Mary & John Pappajohn
AD REINHARDT (1913-1967)
Blue Painting, 1951
Details
AD REINHARDT (1913-1967)
Blue Painting, 1951
signed, titled and dated '"BLUE PAINTING, 1951" AD REINHARDT' (on the backing board)
oil on canvas, in artist's frame
40 x 32 in. (101.6 x 81.3 cm.)
Painted in 1951.
Blue Painting, 1951
signed, titled and dated '"BLUE PAINTING, 1951" AD REINHARDT' (on the backing board)
oil on canvas, in artist's frame
40 x 32 in. (101.6 x 81.3 cm.)
Painted in 1951.
Provenance
Galerie Iris Clert, Paris
PaceWildenstein, New York
Acquired from the above by the late owners, 2001
PaceWildenstein, New York
Acquired from the above by the late owners, 2001
Exhibited
Stockholm, Galerie Buren, February-March 1966.
New York, PaceWildenstein, Mondrian and Reinhardt: Influence and Affinity, October-December 1997, n.p., no. 32 (illustrated).
New York, PaceWildenstein, Mondrian and Reinhardt: Influence and Affinity, October-December 1997, n.p., no. 32 (illustrated).
Further Details
“[O]ne can find some of painting's meaning by looking not only at what painters do, but what they refuse to do.” Ad Reinhardt
Although from the same generation as the action painters of the New York School, Ad Reinhardt’s canvases veered from the gestural energy of his peers in favor of the more transcendental. Blue Painting, 1951 is a key example of the artist’s work with color before his nearly total switch to black monochromes a few years later. Distilling the painted surface down into its most basic formal elements, Reinhardt set an important precedent for the practitioners of Minimalism and their eschewal of the artist’s mark. However, rather than embrace mechanical means to create his subtly-hued compositions, the painter meticulously winnowed down his own visual vocabulary to include only the most poignant and necessary elements. “It's been said many times in world art writing,” he mused, “that one can find some of painting's meaning by looking not only at what painters do, but what they refuse to do” (A. Reinhardt, quoted in B. Rose, ed., Art-As-Art: The Selected Writings Of Ad Reinhardt, New York, 1975, p. 50). By consciously stripping his practice of extraneous subjects, signifiers of the artist’s hand, and limiting himself to a much-reduced palette, Reinhardt developed a pure mode of abstraction all his own.
At first glance, Blue Painting, 1951 overtakes one’s vision with a preponderance of blue. The smooth, unbroken surface avoids any brushstrokes or relics of the artist’s hand and instead favors areas of pure color. On further exploration, the composition resolves into three horizontal bands bordered on the top and bottom by rectilinear forms in similar tones. The middle stripe is a lighter blue and is held in place visually by two darker areas. The top and bottom forms are similar in composition, but the colors are not entirely the same. This offset has a layering effect that brings visual depth to an otherwise incredibly flat painting. Artist and author Budd Hopkins once wrote that Reinhardt’s canvases offered a "... refreshing experience in color imagery in which simplified areas give free vent to a continuous, flat activity of relationships that rest, unchecked, throughout the canvases. Reinhardt works with an interplay of positive and negative areas that are so conceived as to reverse themselves and transcend these elements--positive becomes negative and vice-versa, and the whole settles into a restful presentation of feelings in paint" (B. Hopkins, "An Ad for Ad as Ad," Artforum, Summer, 1976, pp. 62-63). Working with great intensity to balance each element against its neighbor, Reinhardt’s success lies in the subsequent simplicity on display.
In the 1940s, Reinhardt increasingly embraced the geometric structures inherent to earlier Cubist and Modernist practitioners, such as Piet Mondrian. However, rather than rely on representational subjects, he highlighted the squares and rectangles as their own units beholden only to composition and color. As the decade wore on, these areas grew larger and more uniform as they veered away from expressive arrangements in favor of minimal constructions that filled the canvas with red, blue, or ultimately black areas of paint set off from each other by subtle shifts in tone. By the 1950s, he had entirely shifted his practice toward monochromes like the present example about which Lucy Lippard noted, “His choice of red and blue may have been in recognition of a dualism present in all his work from the early forties, his interest in both a very warm and a very cool light.” (L. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, 1981, p. 97).
Reinhardt’s oeuvre continued to refine itself as it emphasized the critical elements of painting itself. The areas of color mimicked the frame of the canvas itself and made one more aware of core tenets of Modernist thought like shape, surface, and material. Tracing the evolution of his work, one observes a clear indebtedness to historical precedence and a marked urgency to push painting into its next act.
Although from the same generation as the action painters of the New York School, Ad Reinhardt’s canvases veered from the gestural energy of his peers in favor of the more transcendental. Blue Painting, 1951 is a key example of the artist’s work with color before his nearly total switch to black monochromes a few years later. Distilling the painted surface down into its most basic formal elements, Reinhardt set an important precedent for the practitioners of Minimalism and their eschewal of the artist’s mark. However, rather than embrace mechanical means to create his subtly-hued compositions, the painter meticulously winnowed down his own visual vocabulary to include only the most poignant and necessary elements. “It's been said many times in world art writing,” he mused, “that one can find some of painting's meaning by looking not only at what painters do, but what they refuse to do” (A. Reinhardt, quoted in B. Rose, ed., Art-As-Art: The Selected Writings Of Ad Reinhardt, New York, 1975, p. 50). By consciously stripping his practice of extraneous subjects, signifiers of the artist’s hand, and limiting himself to a much-reduced palette, Reinhardt developed a pure mode of abstraction all his own.
At first glance, Blue Painting, 1951 overtakes one’s vision with a preponderance of blue. The smooth, unbroken surface avoids any brushstrokes or relics of the artist’s hand and instead favors areas of pure color. On further exploration, the composition resolves into three horizontal bands bordered on the top and bottom by rectilinear forms in similar tones. The middle stripe is a lighter blue and is held in place visually by two darker areas. The top and bottom forms are similar in composition, but the colors are not entirely the same. This offset has a layering effect that brings visual depth to an otherwise incredibly flat painting. Artist and author Budd Hopkins once wrote that Reinhardt’s canvases offered a "... refreshing experience in color imagery in which simplified areas give free vent to a continuous, flat activity of relationships that rest, unchecked, throughout the canvases. Reinhardt works with an interplay of positive and negative areas that are so conceived as to reverse themselves and transcend these elements--positive becomes negative and vice-versa, and the whole settles into a restful presentation of feelings in paint" (B. Hopkins, "An Ad for Ad as Ad," Artforum, Summer, 1976, pp. 62-63). Working with great intensity to balance each element against its neighbor, Reinhardt’s success lies in the subsequent simplicity on display.
In the 1940s, Reinhardt increasingly embraced the geometric structures inherent to earlier Cubist and Modernist practitioners, such as Piet Mondrian. However, rather than rely on representational subjects, he highlighted the squares and rectangles as their own units beholden only to composition and color. As the decade wore on, these areas grew larger and more uniform as they veered away from expressive arrangements in favor of minimal constructions that filled the canvas with red, blue, or ultimately black areas of paint set off from each other by subtle shifts in tone. By the 1950s, he had entirely shifted his practice toward monochromes like the present example about which Lucy Lippard noted, “His choice of red and blue may have been in recognition of a dualism present in all his work from the early forties, his interest in both a very warm and a very cool light.” (L. Lippard, Ad Reinhardt, 1981, p. 97).
Reinhardt’s oeuvre continued to refine itself as it emphasized the critical elements of painting itself. The areas of color mimicked the frame of the canvas itself and made one more aware of core tenets of Modernist thought like shape, surface, and material. Tracing the evolution of his work, one observes a clear indebtedness to historical precedence and a marked urgency to push painting into its next act.
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Senior Vice President, Senior Specialist, Co-Head of 20th Century Evening Sale